Good Deeds vs Good Intentions

A wise man (Ben Harper) once said, “there’s good deeds and there’s good intentions, and they’re as far apart as heaven and hell.”

The news that Wattie’s and McCain’s are shutting down New Zealand manufacturing due to high energy, labour and environmental costs feels like a case study in exactly that gap. Good intentions, uncomfortable outcomes.

New Zealanders, and our governments, expect farmers and factories to produce food with high environmental standards, strong labour protections, and rigorous food safety controls. Our export brand depends on it. We regulate accordingly, and we take pride in what our producers deliver.

But our behaviour at the checkout tells a different story.

We’ve banned sow crates, yet around 60% of our pork is imported from countries where they’re still standard. We bypass local canned corn for Thai imports produced under questionable environmental controls. We export raw logs, only to re-import processed timber made with cheap labour and waterways polluted somewhere else. We bring in roughly two million tonnes of palm kernel annually to feed dairy cows while our local arable farmers are struggling.

The pattern is consistent: we demand high standards at home, then import around them.

At the same time, we’ve made it increasingly difficult to build the infrastructure that would reduce our reliance on imports. Environmental and planning barriers constrain irrigation storage and hydro development. When the wind drops, imported coal fills the gap when we have some of the best quality coal in the world sitting in the ground on the West Coast. The Emissions Trading Scheme helped push Marsden Point’s closure, leaving us dependent on offshore refining for the fuel that keeps the country moving.

None of these decisions happen in isolation. Each raises the costs for local producers who already operate without the subsidies many overseas competitors enjoy. Yet those producers must compete against imports that aren’t held to the same standards. The result is predictable: margins shrink, investment stalls, and eventually, capacity disappears.

That’s what we’re starting to see. Processing shuts down. Skills and capacity erode. And the “solution”, outsourcing environmental and social costs offshore, looks tidy on paper.

Strategically, though, it’s a gamble. We are tying our food, fertiliser and energy security ever more tightly to global supply chains and geopolitical stability, forces we don’t control and highly reliant on the likes of Iran and Trump to play nicely.

This is the paradox of our approach. We want to lead on environmental and ethical standards, but we undercut the very systems that make that leadership credible.

If the goal is better global environmental outcomes, it’s worth asking a harder question: is the world better off consuming more of New Zealand’s efficiently and sustainably produced food—or less?

Consumers do have some agency here. Choosing New Zealand-made products, even when they cost more, is one way to close the gap. So is backing policies that strengthen, rather than hollow out, our energy and primary sectors.

Because in the end, markets respond to our deeds, not our intentions.

Eva Harris is  Principal Environmental Advisor for Enviro Collective